The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#2351
Joel Smoller
#50024
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Joel Alan Smoller was an American mathematician. Joel Smoller was born in Brooklyn on 2 January 1936 to parents Benjamin, a taxicab driver, and Olga, who died when he was young. Smoller attended New York University, and completed his doctoral work at Purdue University in 1963, after which he taught at the University of Michigan. In 1970, he was appointed a full professor, and assumed the Lamberto Cesari Collegiate Professorship of Mathematics in 1998. He was editor of Transactions of the American Mathematical Society from 1981 to 1985, and later the Journal for Applicable Analysis. Smoller wa...
Go to Profile#2352
Alfred W. Hales
#36473
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alfred Washington Hales is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the namesakes of the Hales–Jewett theorem. He was born in Pasadena, California, and is the older brother of R. Stanton Hales.
Go to Profile#2353
Philip Dawid
#32264
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alexander Philip Dawid is Emeritus Professor of Statistics of the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He is a leading proponent of Bayesian statistics. Education Dawid was educated at the City of London School, Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Darwin College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2354
Ovidiu Savin
#50820
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Ovidiu Vasile Savin is a Romanian-American mathematician who is active in the field of the partial differential equations. Scientific activity Savin received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 having Luis Caffarelli as advisor; he is professor of mathematics at Columbia University. Savin is mostly known for his important work on Ennio de Giorgi's conjecture about global solutions to certain semilinear equations, that he proved up to dimension 8. It is to be noticed that the conjecture turns out to be false in higher dimensions, as eventually proved by Manuel del Pino, Michał Kowalczyk, and Juncheng Wei.
Go to Profile#2355
Lassi Päivärinta
#48625
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lassi Päivärinta is a Finnish mathematician, one-time professor of applied mathematics at the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Helsinki. Päivärinta's research is mostly in the fields of inverse problems and partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#2356
Vincent Blondel
#16538
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Vincent Daniel Blondel is a Belgian professor of applied mathematics and current rector of the University of Louvain and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Blondel's research lies in the area of mathematical control theory and theoretical computer science. He is mostly known for his contributions in computational complexity in control, multi-agent coordination and complex networks.
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Robert F. Coleman
#35443
Overall Influence
1954 - 2014 (60 years)
Robert Frederick Coleman was an American mathematician, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography After graduating from Nova High School, he completed his bachelor's degree at Harvard University in 1976 and subsequently attended Cambridge University for Part III of the mathematical tripos. While there John H. Coates provided him with a problem for his doctoral thesis , which he completed at Princeton University in 1979 under the advising of Kenkichi Iwasawa. He then had a one-year postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study and then taught at Harvard University for three years.
Go to Profile#2358
Bhama Srinivasan
#34844
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Bhama Srinivasan is a mathematician known for her work in the representation theory of finite groups. Her contributions were honored with the 1990 Noether Lecture. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1981 to 1983.
Go to Profile#2359
Douglas N. Arnold
#43140
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Douglas Norman "Doug" Arnold is a mathematician whose research focuses on the numerical analysis of partial differential equations with applications in mechanics and other fields in physics. , he is McKnight Presidential Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#2360
Theodore Frankel
#51462
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Theodore Frankel was a mathematician who introduced the Andreotti–Frankel theorem and the Frankel conjecture. Frankel received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955. His doctoral advisor was Harley Flanders. A Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at University of California, San Diego, Frankel was a longtime member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is known for his work in global differential geometry, Morse theory, and relativity theory. He joined the UC San Diego mathematics department in 1965, after serving on the faculties at Stanford Un...
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András Prékopa
#36545
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
András Prékopa was a Hungarian mathematician, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was one of the pioneers of stochastic programming and has been a major contributor to its literature. He amended one of the three basic model types of the discipline, chance-constrained programming, by taking into account stochastic dependence among the random variables involved. One of his main results in the area concerns the convexity theory of probabilistically constrained stochastic optimization problems. He introduced the concept of logarithmic concave measures and provided several fundamenta...
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T. A. Springer
#53331
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Tonny Albert Springer was a mathematician at Utrecht University who worked on linear algebraic groups, Hecke algebrass, complex reflection groups, and who introduced Springer representations and the Springer resolution.
Go to Profile#2363
Stathis Zachos
#23743
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Stathis K. Zachos is a mathematician, logician , pimp and theoretical computer scientist. Biography Zachos received his PhD from the ETHZ in Mathematics , 1978. He has held the posts of professor in Computer Science at UCSB, CUNY and NTUA and Adjunct professor at ETHZ. He has worked as a researcher at MIT, Brown-Boveri.
Go to Profile#2364
Luis Radford
#25863
Overall Influence
Luis Radford is professor at the School of Education Sciences at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. His research interests cover both theoretical and practical aspects of mathematics thinking, teaching, and learning. His current research draws on Lev Vygotsky's historical-cultural school of thought, as well as Evald Ilyenkov's epistemology, in a conceptual framework influenced by Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin, leading to a non-utilitarian and a non-instrumentalist conception of the classroom and education.
Go to Profile#2365
Wendy Myrvold
#33177
Overall Influence
Wendy Joanne Myrvold is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on graph algorithms, planarity testing, and algorithms in enumerative combinatorics. She is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Victoria.
Go to Profile#2366
Nachum Dershowitz
#12114
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nachum Dershowitz is an Israeli computer scientist, known e.g. for the Dershowitz–Manna ordering and the multiset path ordering used to prove termination of term rewrite systems. He obtained his B.Sc. summa cum laude in 1974 in Computer Science–Applied Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University, and his Ph.D. in 1979 in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. From 1978, he worked at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was hired as a full professor of the Tel Aviv University in 1998. He was a guest researcher at Weizmann Inst...
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Stephen Hilbert
#39814
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stephen R. Hilbert is an American mathematician best known as co-author of the Bramble–Hilbert lemma, which he published with James H. Bramble in 1970. Hilbert's area of specialty is numerical analysis. He has been a professor of mathematics at Ithaca College since 1968. Additionally, he taught mathematics at Cornell University as a visiting program professor during the 2003–2004 academic year.
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Alexander Oppenheim
#17014
Overall Influence
1903 - 1997 (94 years)
Sir Alexander Oppenheim, OBE FRSE KT PMN was a British mathematician and university administrator. In Diophantine approximation and the theory of quadratic forms, he proposed the Oppenheim conjecture.
Go to Profile#2369
Martin Löb
#11124
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Martin Hugo Löb was a German mathematician. He settled in the United Kingdom after the Second World War and specialised in mathematical logic. He moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s, where he remained in retirement. He is perhaps best known for having formulated Löb's theorem in 1955.
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Sigeru Mizohata
#50821
Overall Influence
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
Sigeru Mizohata was a Japanese mathematician, who specialized in the theory of partial differential equations. Biography Sigeru Mizohata graduated from the Faculty of Science at the Kyoto Imperial University in 1947, where he was studying under Hiroshi Okamura. From 1954 to 1957 he studied in France as an international student; this left a lasting impact, with many of his research papers subsequently published in French. His research interests mainly concerned hyperbolic partial differential equations and the use of functional analysis in the theory of PDEs. He was awarded an honorary doctor...
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William Thomas Fletcher
#35093
Overall Influence
William Thomas Fletcher is an American mathematician. Education He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from North Carolina Central University , Durham, NC in 1956 and 1958 respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Idaho in 1966.
Go to Profile#2372
Boris Levin
#41070
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Boris Yakovlevich Levin was a Soviet mathematician who made significant contributions to function theory. Biography Boris Yakovlevich Levin was born 22 December 1906 in Odessa. In 1932 he graduated from the University of North Caucasus . From 1935 to 1949 he is Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematics of the Odessa Institute of Marine Engineers.
Go to Profile#2373
József Solymosi
#39387
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
József Solymosi is a Hungarian-Canadian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. His main research interests are arithmetic combinatorics, discrete geometry, graph theory, and combinatorial number theory.
Go to Profile#2374
Paul Sutcliffe
#38762
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Paul Michael Sutcliffe is British mathematical physicist and mathematician, currently Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Durham. He specialises in the study of topological solitons.
Go to Profile#2375
Glen Bredon
#51957
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Glen Eugene Bredon was an American mathematician who worked in the area of topology. Education and career Bredon received a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1954 and a master's degree from Harvard University in 1955. In 1958, he wrote his PhD thesis at Harvard under the supervision of Andrew M. Gleason. Starting in 1960, he worked as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and since 1969 at Rutgers University, until he retired in 1993, after which he moved to North Fork, California.
Go to Profile#2376
Andreas Dress
#30748
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Andreas Dress is a German mathematician specializing in geometry, combinatorics and mathematical biology. Dress earned his PhD from the University of Kiel in 1962, under the supervision of Friedrich Bachmann and Karl-Heinrich Weise. His thesis is entitled Konstruktion metrischer Ebenen.
Go to Profile#2377
Pamela Cook
#39367
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Leslie Pamela Cook-Ioannidis is an American mathematician, the Unidel Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. She was the president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for 2015–2016. Her research concerns fluid dynamics.
Go to Profile#2378
Robert Calderbank
#10488
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert Calderbank is a professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics and director of the Information Initiative at Duke University. He received a BSc from Warwick University in 1975, an MSc from Oxford in 1976, and a PhD from Caltech in 1980, all in mathematics. He joined Bell Labs in 1980, and retired from AT&T Labs in 2003 as Vice President for Research and Internet and network systems. He then went to Princeton as a professor of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics, before moving to Duke in 2010 to become Dean of Natural S...
Go to Profile#2379
John Edwin Luecke
#35919
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Edwin Luecke is an American mathematician who works in topology and knot theory. He got his Ph.D. in 1985 from the University of Texas at Austin and is now a professor in the department of mathematics at that institution.
Go to Profile#2380
Norair Arakelian
#50526
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Norair Unanovich Arakelian is an Armenian and Soviet mathematician, specializing in approximation theory and complex analysis. He is known for Arakelian's approximation theorem. Also, on the base of his approximation theory results, Arakelian has disproved an old conjecture of Rolf Nevanlinna from the value distribution theory. This and other his results Arakelian has presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Nice in 1970.
Go to Profile#2381
R. Ranga Rao
#46468
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ramaswamy Ranga Rao was a prominent Indian mathematician. He finished his Ph.D. under the supervision of C.R. Rao at ISI, Calcutta. He was one of the "famous four" students of Rao: in ISI during 1956-1963.
Go to Profile#2382
Anders Martin-Löf
#18377
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anders Martin-Löf is a Swedish physicist and mathematician. He has been a professor at the Department of Mathematics of Stockholm University. Martin-Löf did his undergraduate studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and got his exam in engineering physics in 1963. He continued with graduate studies in optimization at KTH and at MIT in the United States from 1967–1968, later on followed by a position as Research Associate at the Rockefeller University in New York City 1970–1971, working with probability theory and applications to statistical mechanics. he received his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#2383
K. David Elworthy
#49351
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Kenneth David Elworthy is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. He works on stochastic analysis, stochastic differential equations and geometric analysis. Life and career Elworthy was born on 21 December 1940. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School, and in 1959 went up to Merton College, Oxford to read Mathematics as an undergraduate. In 1964 he married Susan Margaret Anderson. His DPhil was completed in 1967 under the supervision of Michael Francis Atiyah at the University of Oxford. Before his retirement from Warwick, he held a personal chair there. He also ser...
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T. Tony Cai
#18762
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Tianwen Tony Cai is a Chinese statistician. He is the Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Statistics and Vice Dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also professor of Applied Math & Computational Science Graduate Group, and associate scholar at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. In 2008 Tony Cai was awarded the COPSS Presidents' Award.
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Marc Rieffel
#50753
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Marc Aristide Rieffel is a mathematician noted for his fundamental contributions to C*-algebra and quantum group theory. He is currently a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#2386
Joseph Madachy
#19782
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Joseph Steven Madachy was a research chemist, technical editor and recreational mathematician. He was the lead editor of Journal of Recreational Mathematics for nearly 30 years and then served as editor emeritus. He was owner, publisher and editor of its predecessor, Recreational Mathematics Magazine, which appeared from 1961 to 1964.
Go to Profile#2387
Tze Leung Lai
#51035
Overall Influence
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Tze Leung Lai was a Chinese-American statistician of Hong Kong descent. He was the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Statistics, as well as a professor of Biomedical Data Science and of the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. He co-directed the Center for Innovative Study Design at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the recipient of the COPSS Presidents' Award, one of the highest honors in statistics, in 1983.
Go to Profile#2388
Gordon K Smyth
#55152
Overall Influence
#2389
Paul Sally
#30571
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Paul Joseph Sally, Jr. was a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, where he was the director of undergraduate studies for 30 years. His research areas were p-adic analysis and representation theory.
Go to Profile#2390
Randall J. LeVeque
#42463
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Randall J. LeVeque is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at University of Washington who works in many fields including numerical analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and mathematical theory of conservation laws. Among other contributions, he is lead developer of the open source software project Clawpack for solving hyperbolic partial differential equations using the finite volume method. With Zhilin Li, he has also devised a numerical technique called the immersed interface method for solving problems with elastic boundaries or surface tension.
Go to Profile#2391
Daniel Tătaru
#47357
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Daniel Ioan Tătaru is a Romanian mathematician at University of California, Berkeley. He earned his doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1992, under supervision of Irena Lasiecka. He won the 2002 Bôcher Memorial Prize for his research on partial differential equations. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2013 he was selected as a Simons Investigator in mathematics.
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Lane P. Hughston
#26997
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Lane P. Hughston is an American mathematician. Early life and education Lane P. Hughston was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and raised in Dallas, Texas, where he attended J. J. Pershing Elementary School, Benjamin Franklin Junior High School, and Hillcrest High School. He is the son of Edward Wallace Hughston and Joan Palmer Hughston. He holds a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a student of Roger Penrose. While he was a student at Oxford he was based at Magdalen College.
Go to Profile#2393
Ivor Robinson
#38759
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ivor Robinson was a British-American mathematical physicist, born and educated in England, noted for his important contributions to the theory of relativity. He was a principal organizer of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.
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Ralph Kaufmann
#43784
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ralph Martin Kaufmann is a German mathematician working in the United States. Career Kaufmann studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Bonn. He obtained a master's degree in Physics in 1994 under the supervision of Werner Nahm and a master's degree in philosophy under the supervision of Rainer Stuhlmann-Laeisz in 1996. His doctoral studies were carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics under the supervision of Yuri Manin, and he graduated summa cum laude from University of Bonn in 1997 with a thesis entitled "The geometry of the moduli space of pointed cu...
Go to Profile#2395
Ortrud Oellermann
#21615
Overall Influence
Ortrud R. Oellermann is a South African mathematician specializing in graph theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Winnipeg. Education and career Oellermann was born in Vryheid. She earned a bachelor's degree, cum laude honours, and a master's degree at the University of Natal in 1981, 1982, and 1983 respectively, as a student of Henda Swart. She completed her Ph.D. in 1986 at Western Michigan University. Her dissertation was Generalized Connectivity in Graphs and was supervised by Gary Chartrand.
Go to Profile#2396
Oscar Kempthorne
#31715
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Oscar Kempthorne was a British statistician and geneticist known for his research on randomization-analysis and the design of experiments, which had wide influence on research in agriculture, genetics, and other areas of science.
Go to Profile#2397
Arjun Kumar Gupta
#53095
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Arjun Kumar Gupta was a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Gupta was born in Uttar Pradesh, India in 1938. Gupta received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Poona University in India and his PhD from Purdue University.
Go to Profile#2398
Lotte Hollands
#34842
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Lotte Hollands is a Dutch mathematician and mathematical physicist who studies quantum field theory, supersymmetric gauge theory, and string theory. She is an associate professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University.
Go to Profile#2399
Nagayoshi Iwahori
#55242
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
was a Japanese mathematician who worked on algebraic groups over local fields who introduced Iwahori–Hecke algebras and Iwahori subgroups. Publications See also Chevalley–Iwahori–Nagata theorem
Go to Profile#2400
Alison Miller
#39976
Overall Influence
Alison Beth Miller is an American mathematician who was the first American female gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She also holds the distinction of placing in the top 16 of the Putnam Competition four times, the last three of which were recognized by the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam award for outstanding performance by a woman on the contest.
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